Nonfiction for Fiction Writers

I'm just back from Readercon 27, the annual convention that I've been to more than any other, and for which (a while back) I served on the program committee for a few years. At this point, Readercon feels like a family reunion for me, and it's a delight.

Here, I simply want to riff on ideas from one of the panels I participated in.

Friday, I was on my first panel of the convention, "Nonfiction for Fiction Writers", with Jonathan Crowe, Keffy Kehrli, Tom Purdom, Rick Wilber. It was good fun. I'd taken lots of notes beforehand, because I wasn't really sure what direction the panel would go in and I wanted to be prepared and to not forget any particular favorites. Ultimately, and expectedly, I only got to mention a few of the items I was prepared to talk about.

However, since I still have my notes, I can expand on it all here...

Locus 20th & 21st Centuries Poll

Locus this month has been conducting a poll to find out the "best" science fiction and fantasy novels and short fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. Though I first suggested on Twitter that I would be filling it all in with Raymond Carver stories, I gave in today at the last minute and instead filled in the poll with some choices other than Carver stories (though I was tempted to put "Why Don't You Dance?" on there, since it has a certain fantasy feel to it, at least to me).

I'll post my choices after the jump here.

Two Lists

At other places around the internet, there is listing going on. I can't resist a good list. Though neither of these two listing events is one I was invited to join, both made me think, "What would I put on such a list?" (Lists are fiercely contagious.)

Desert Island DVDs

It's a new year and a Saturday morning (as I type this), I have lots of stuff I should be doing, and this here thingamabob is a blog, which means -- time for a useless, ephemeral, and yet powerfully enticing internet meme (aka, tool of procrastination)!

At Salon, one of my favorite movie critics, Matt Zoller Seitz, created a slideshow of his picks for DVDs he'd want if stranded on a desert island (with, presumably, endless food and water and a great home/island video system). There are rules (1 short, 1 season of a TV show, etc.). Many people have left their own lists in the comments section of the slideshow, and critic Jim Emerson has also offered his own list, with further lists made by commenters at his site.

So, to keep the internet going, here is my contribution...

Personality Test: Top 10 Directors

It's summer and I don't feel like writing a post of substance, so here's some fluff.

On Facebook*, someone I know (who is welcome to out himself here if he so chooses), posted a fun exercise: "Apparently somewhere on facebook there's a challenge to name your favorite ten movie directors off the top of your head, no research or googling," adding: "It's an interesting personality test."

It is indeed. I'm going to be brave and see what I come up with this morning...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Howard Hawks
Alfred Hitchcock
Werner Herzog
Stanley Kubrick
Terrence Malick
Anthony Mann
Michael Mann
Jean Renoir
Francois Truffaut

The list itself took all of one minute (alphabetizing it and finding appropriate links for each took longer), and is probably one that would be similar were I to do it on another day -- certainly, there are a bunch of directors who I thought about including (Orson Welles, David Lynch, Wong Kar-Wai, the Coen Brothers, Robert Altmann, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Akira Kurosawa, John Sayles, Terry Gilliam, Woody Allen, Guy Maddin, Gregg Araki, others) but whose work I am most interested in for only a few films, while a couple of others I love (Preston Sturges) or am fascinated by (Michael Haneke), but I really have to be in the right mood to watch their films. The list is of directors who, if you were to say to me at just about any time, "Let's watch a movie by x," I would probably say, "Let's go!"

Certainly, most of them, particularly the most productive ones, created some films of not particularly great value, but they all still have their interesting moments. And their best movies are ones I could watch forever.

What about the personality test part, since these are the names that came most quickly to mind?

They're all men, which is not entirely surprising, given how sexist the world of filmmaking has been; the number of women who have been directors is scandalously low.

Every person on the list is either European or American, which is a bit of a surprise, because I don't limit myself to those regions as a viewer, but they're clearly the ones I feel most connection to as a viewer. This is probably related to the fact that almost all of them are directors I first connected to before I was 20 years old. My father's interest in German film meant I saw Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and The Marriage of Maria Braun and Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo when I was in high school, I first saw Truffaut's The 400 Blows in college and spent the then-immense sum of $35 to buy a VHS tape of the film so I could watch it over and over and over. I saw Michael Mann's Heat in the theatre 3 times.  Etc. The only ones there I discovered after college (though in my early 20s) are Renoir and Malick; both were love at first sight.

None of those directors specialized in comedy, though some of them created some sublime comedies, Hawks in particular. But on the whole, it's a pretty intense, even bleak group. A pretty "masculine" group, too, which is fairly surprising to me, as I am generally, and happily, a failure at masculinity. None of them are generally considered radically "experimental" filmmakers, though certainly Fassbinder, Herzog, and Lynch have made films that are experimentalist; those aren't my favorites of theirs, though. They all produced innovative work, but none are Stan Brakhage. Relatedly, it's significant that Renoir and Truffaut are there and Godard is not. The only Godard film I've ever really loved is Breathless; I can appreciate some of the others, but I always feel like I'm being dutiful when I watch Godard. I once told a cinephile, only half-jokingly, that I feel like one of the most shameful things I could ever admit is that I love Truffaut over Godard, but there it is.

And now I have succeeded in making myself want to be irresponsible, abandon all the many things I need to do today, and watch a movie...

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*By the way, I've never said it here, so will take this opportunity: I use Facebook mostly for just silly and personal stuffs, nothing revelatory, so keep Friends to people I either know or know of in real life, or people with whom I've communicated in some way. Anything of substance I have to say about writing or publishing happens here or via Twitter, and my email address is public, so that works just fine for getting in touch if you need.

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

The folks at NPR are asking for summer suggestions of "The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books", from which they will compile a final list.

There are 1,850 comments and counting right now. Plenty of the sorts of books that have inhabited such lists for decades (The Foundation Trilogy, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, Lord of the Rings, etc.), but also lots of idiosyncratic choices, which is, I think, exactly what such a list should get -- indeed, I would love them to get so many eclectic comments that it's impossible for a list of fewer than 534 titles to be created from it.

In that spirit, I submitted two lists:

The Odyssey by Homer
Hamlet by Shakespeare [though, on reflection, I think if I were to do it again I'd put Twelfth Night here]
The Double by Dostoyevsky
The Castle by Kafka
Orlando by Woolf

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison
We Who Are About To by Joanna Russ
The Return to Nevèrÿon series by Samuel R. Delany
The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad
The Affirmation by Christopher Priest

Since those two lists are so obviously inadequate and incomplete, I thought about making more -- lists of books not originally written in English, lists of books only by x,y,z type of person, lists of books starting with the letter M, etc. When it comes to lists, two is not enough, and neither is infinity.

But I very much enjoyed fantasizing about what would happen in the brain of someone who sat on a beach through the summer and read all of those books...

Books for Men

Inspired by a list from Esquire of "The 75 Books Every Man Should Read" -- which, aside from perhaps a few other problems*, includes only one book by a woman (Flannery O'Connor) -- Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis at Joyland asked folks for suggestions of books by women that men should read. The resulting list is a lot of fun, and a fine place to go if you're looking for suggestions for what to read.

(Also, you should read Ta-Nehisi Coates's commentary on it. But you read his blog anyway, so I don't need to tell you that, right?)

I'm in a frivolously list-making mood, so thought I would add and ditto a few choices, though I'm going to narrow my parameters a little...

25 Works Of Fiction By People Identified As Women (As Far As I Know) That I At This Particular Moment Think Might Be Interesting To Men Who Are Curious To Read More Of Such Things, Though Of Course Tastes Vary

1. Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker
2. So Long a Letter by Miriama Bâ
3. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
4. The Inhabited Woman by Gioconda Belli
5. Wild Seed by Octavia Butler
6. Heartsick by Chelsea Cain
7. The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos
8. Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang
9. The Collected Stories by Deborah Eisenberg
10. Money Shot by Christa Faust
11. Scented Gardens for the Blind by Janet Frame
12. The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith
13. A Shattering of Silence by Farida Karodia
14. Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin
15. The Art Lover by Carole Maso
16. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh
17. Hav by Jan Morris
18. The Collected Stories by Grace Paley
19. Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
20. Death in Spring by Mercé Rodoreda
21. The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner
22. Empathy by Sarah Schulman
23. In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif
24. White Walls: Collected Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya
25. He Who Searches by Luisa Valenzuela

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*The books? What sorts? And what is this "man" being of which you speak? But of course, "75 Works of Fiction and Narrative Nonfiction Some People Who Work for Esquire Think the Marketing Demographic of Esquire Should Read" is a less sexy title.

20th Century Poetry

A few days ago, Scott Esposito wrote about tackling Louis Zukofsky's A, which he said was part of an informal list a poet friend had given him in response to a question from Scott: "I want to know more about poetry–what do you recommend?" I and other sufferers of 'satiable curtiosity pleaded in the comments to the post to see the full list, and now Scott has gotten permission to share it.

It's a wonderful list because it's diverse, personal, and would allow any reader to expand her or his reading. It also presumes the reader is experienced and curious; it's not a Poetry 101 list, so there are some obvious names missing (Williams, Pound) to make way for ones the list writer is particularly passionate about. And the selections are mostly of "difficult" poetry more than people like Mary Oliver or Billy Collins.

Of course, the list could be ten or a hundred times as long, but that would be much less helpful.

I'm resisting the temptation to offer my own idiosyncratic list, partly because I'm not a poet and am not nearly as familiar with contemporary poetry as Scott's friend, so my likes and dislikes among living poets are deeply idioscyncratic, full of holes and inconsistencies (although I will say, among recent discoveries, Jennifer Moxley and Donna Stonecipher make me happy to be able to read the English language). The only inconceivable lack on the list Scott posted that I see is Paul Celan, but that's just because Celan is, to me, the 20th century poet.

Maybe it's my teacherly inclinations, but I love these sorts of lists, where folks come up with obviously incomplete and personal guides to realms that can seem imposing to people less familiar with them. Modern and contemporary poetry are definitely such realms, so three cheers for Scott and his friend for creating and sharing the list.

A Few Lists, Mostly of Films

The new year is a time of many lists. I have a love/hate relationship with lists; here are a few ones I have recently loved more than hated:

Reverse Shot's List of Best Films of 2010
A lot of "best of the year" lists of movies are terribly similar, and this year they seemed especially so. I like such lists mostly as ways to discover film I haven't heard of, and though by the time I got to Reverse Shot's list, I knew about most of the titles on it, I found the selection refreshingly different from most. (My basic criterion for whether I trusted a critic's listmaking this year was if they included Inception on their list or not. If it was there, I didn't think they'd either seen enough movies or developed enough judgment; if it was absent, I was willing to take a look at what they had to say.) Reverse Shot's list of the 11 films they most hated this year is amusing, but not nearly as valuable as their list of bests.

New Deal Sally: 2010 Top Ten
This may be the best-written top ten list I've read yet this year. I like a lot of the choices, but more than that, the whole thing reads as much like a personal essay as a list.

Matt Zoller Seitz's video essays on the Best Scenes of 2010
Seitz's video essays are always worth watching, and these are no exception -- creative, precise, informative. Any of us might come up with a totally different set of scenes from 2010's films, but few people are as skilled at creating video essays to explicate what they see in a film the way Seitz is.

DVD Beaver's List of the Best DVDs and Blu-Rays of the Year
This is actually a bunch of different people's lists, and then at the end is an aggregated list. DVD Beaver is one of the essential internet sites for me, with hugely valuable comparisons of different home video editions of all sorts of films. They're global, though English-language-focused, in the editions they compare, which is helpful, and these lists are no exception to that.

Finally, a non-film list:

John Sutherland's Top 10 Books About Books
What I most like about this list is that it doesn't go in for cheap shots against academics, and it's also a nice corrective to folks who say that the only people who should write criticism are people who also write novels or poetry or some such thing -- Sontag is the only one on the list who I know to have done so with any seriousness. These are writers whose art is criticism, and though my own pantheon might be somewhat different, or I might choose different samples of their work (for instance, starting with S/Z seems to me a tough way to get to know Barthes) -- but if a reader wanted to get a sense of some of the possibilities serious literary criticism can offer, they could do a lot worse than to take a look at these books.

Horror Countdowns

It's the month of Halloween, and a couple of websites are running countdowns of great horror movies, providing essays in justification of their ideas.  Well worth reading are those at Wonders in the Dark and Gestalt Mash.  We'd all rank our favorite such films differently, of course, and it will be fun in the end to see which films get missed (I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to see if one of my own favorites, Blood Feast, gets included on either list!  One must always use exclamation points when talking about Blood Feast!!!  I love it as much for its poster as for the film itself!!!!)  The rankings are interesting, though -- for instance, Wonders in the Dark lists the seminal, original Texas Chainsaw Massacre as #25, and I would be inclined to put it in the top ten; I'm impressed that the writers think there are 24 horror movies superior to and more important than the original TCM.  (And I Walked with a Zombie is all the way back at 85?!?  Insanity!  I'd move it ahead by about eighty spots.)

Oh, where would the world be without lists?!  How did the world ever get by without our being able to fight over such things?!?

Books I'd Be Reading If I Had the Time

I'd intended to read a bunch of new fiction this spring, but then decided to reconfigure some of the classes I'll be teaching in the fall, which meant having to plunge into all sorts of other books (about which I'll be writing here soon, I expect).  I'm loving the research, since it appeals to a bunch of my various obsessions (e.g. how white people represent whiteness and non-whiteness), but it's left me with exactly no time for other reading.  By the summer, I'm hoping to have the research mostly done, and thus expect to be able to freely read all sorts of things, but until then, here are some of the books I'd be reading if I weren't reading other books...*

•  A Book of Endings by Deborah Biancotti.  Deb very kindly sent me a copy of this collection of her short stories, and I've only had a chance to read a couple so far, which makes me sad, because I very much want to read them all -- not just because I've enjoyed what I've read so far, but because Deb is a great person who deserves the support and enthusiasm of readers.  And she puts up with my silly jokes about Australia being on the bottom of the world.  Because she knows North American boys are silly and ignorant about the fact that they themselves actually live on the bottom of the world.  A Book of Endings has gotten some great reviews, and even the less-than-great reviews have intrigued me -- I'm a big fan of stuff that's tasteless and improbable.  Because really, would you be compelled to read something somebody called "tasteful and probable"?  Not I!  In fact, I hope Deb subtitles her next collection "More Tasteless and Improbable Stories from Deborah Biancotti".  But I hope she doesn't release a new collection too soon, because I need to read this book first...
• Eddie Signwriter by Adam Schwartzman.  This is a debut novel someone at Patheon sent me, thinking perhaps it would be my sort of thing, and it does indeed look like it could be -- the story of a guy born in Ghana, raised in Botswana, who ends up in Paris with a group of, according to Publisher's Weekly, "African immigrants who congregate at a secret club located in a cellar beneath a flower shop."  They also call it "a surprisingly upbeat treament of human trafficking and illegal immigration" and "gorgeously written".  I'll certainly be taking a look at this one this summer.
• Life by Gwyneth Jones.  I've been reading around in Helen Merrick's excellent book The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms, and Merrick discussion of Life makes it sound like a kind of book I love: "centrally concerned with the language and conception of sciences like biology and the way science underwrites and reflects the sex-gender order".  
• The Father and the Foreigner by Giancarlo De Cataldo.  I set this book aside when it arrived last year because it's short and the description included words like "mysterious", "dark", and "frightening", all of which are words I tend to gravitate toward.  And I like the publisher, Europa Editions, whose books are always beautifully produced.
• Tails of Wonder and Imagination edited by Ellen Datlow.  This arrived just before my own cat, and our occasional reviewer, Ms. P. Martha Moog, headed off to the great catnip field in the sky, and I just haven't had the heart to open the book since.
• The End of the Jews by Adam Mansbach. The back of the book calls this "The story of a family of artists who realize, too late, one elemental truth: Creation's necessary consequence is destruction."  That alone got me to stick the book on the "take a look at this eventually" pile.
• The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist.  This book is described as "a gripping exploration of a society in the throes of a system geared toward eliminating those who do not contribute by conventional means, in which the 'dispensable' ones are convinced under gentle coercion of the importance of sacrificing for the 'necessary' ones.  It also looks deeply into the nature of the female psyche, at its resilience and creativity under dire conditions."  While the "female psyche" thing sounds a bit essentialist for my tastes, I'm nonetheless intrigued.
• Who Would Have Thought It? by Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton.  Not only is this called the "first Mexican-American novel" (I don't have the expertise to know if that claim is accurate), but it's partly set in New England during the Civil War era.  A Mexican-American woman in mid-19th Century New England?  Who, indeed, would have thought it...?
• Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories edited by Jonathan Strahan and Charles N. Brown. I love some of Leiber's stories -- particularly "Smoke Ghost" and "Space-Time for Springers" -- but haven't read any for a while.  This collection offers a nice opportunity to catch up, and the contents are quite different from the old Best of Fritz Leiber, which was published before a few of his most famous stories had been written.
• Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin.  The press release for this book addressed me as "Dear Producer", and I was so flattered that the folks at Random House so overestimated my power and influence that I couldn't help but set this book aside for later perusal.  I'm a slave to flattery.  And the story, about the young girl who inspired Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, also seemed worth at least a glance.
• The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To by DC Pierson.  It was the title that caught my attention with this one.  The press release describes it as "at once a poignant coming-of-age tale and a madcap paranoid conspiracy sci-fi thriller".  I don't much care for coming-of-age tales, but madcap paranoid conspiracy sci-fi thriller can be fun if they actually live up to that label (so often, they're not very madcap, paranoid, or thrilling).
• The Passage by Justin Cronin.  I'm embarrassed to admit that I first set this aside because I thought Justin Cronin was Jeremy Cronin, and I was really curious to see what a South African Communist poet would write that would get a blurb from Stephen King.  Then I read the publicity materials, and even after I realized I was thinking of Jeremy and not Justin Cronin, I was still interested in how the book was described, so figured it wouldn't hurt me to give it 50 pages and see if I wanted to keep reading.  But then I didn't have time.  Later, later...
• The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter.  This is a collection of short stories, and I kept it for two reasons: Porter's story "Azul" was first published in One Story shortly before my own story "Blood" appeared there, and I'm curious to read more of Porter's work.  Also, Kevin Brockmeier gave the book a glowing blurb, and I trust Kevin's taste and enthusiasms, because they've not yet led me wrong.
• Death in Spring by Marce Rodoreda.  I picked this up in New York last year because I didn't have any of Open Letter's books, and various people I know and trust had recommended them.  This one looked like a particularly strange and evocative story, so I bought it.  And here it is, still waiting for me a year later...
• The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw.  A couple of people recommended this book to me, and the premise seemed like it would offer good opportunities for weird resonances, and I like weird resonances.  When I thought I was going to have lots of spring reading time, I requested a copy from the good people at Henry Holt & Co., they kindly sent one on, and then I had no time to read it.  I try hard not to request books I don't have time to read, so now I feel guilty.  Which means I will certainly find time to read it in the future, but the future is not now.

Well, that's quite a list.  If one of you out there could create a way to add an extra ten or twenty hours to every day, I'd really appreciate it!

*Links in this post are once again to Amazon because Book Depository is currently unavailable in North America because the volcanic eruption under the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier has caused supply and distribution problems for them, so they've suspended their website for the moment.  Once things are cleared up, posts here will link to Book Depository again, because it's a wonderful service.

Decade: Some Books

Personally, I think everyone should post a list of the books that delighted or awed them over this past decade, without pretending it’s anything definitive.
--Jeff VanderMeer

Nobody ever gets over their first camel.
--Bryher

I love lists and am wary of them.  They are a being that is half parlor game, half manifesto.  And half a few other things, too, including whatever's in the dumpster outside my friend Maury's apartment in Detroit.  (My arithmetic skills are impressive, I know.  And I don't have a friend name Maury.  I'm not sure I even know anybody who lives in Detroit.)

The years 2000-2009 were important ones in my life as a reader, though, and I would like to memorialize them with something.  I could spend the next decade making lists of books from the previous decade, but I've probably got better things to do. Instead, here's a list of books that come to mind this morning, Saturday, 13 February 2010, when I think about the previous ten years. I'll mostly, though not exclusively, stick to fiction here, because I read tons of nonfiction but in a very different way from fiction. Some links are to my reviews or notes about the books, though in cases of books I haven't written about or haven't written about online, I've included a link to The Book Depository, unless I knew of a better source of information.

Here's the list:

00 Movies

Gawker is totally right -- "The choice of our favorite movie of the decade is one of the most important we as individuals can make." (And here I was thinking it was my choice of underwear that defined me -- but that's so '90s!)

Everybody's making lists of the best of everything from 2000-2009 right now. I like reading such things when they're the personal preferences of individuals -- Richard Brody's film list is the most idiosyncratic I've encountered, filled with films I haven't seen and in many cases have never heard of, and of the ones I have seen, they aren't really films I'd put toward the top of my own best-of-the-decade list, were I even able to come up with such a list. And yet I loved reading Brody's list because his explanations worked together to create a sense of how he thinks about his encounters with art.

Similarly, John Patterson's passionate essay on Terrence Malick's The New World as the single best film of the decade is a joy to read because of Patterson's ability to share his deep engagement with Malick's creation. It helps that I'm sympathetic to Patterson's view -- I would certainly include The New World among my favorite ten or even five movies of the decade, though I don't think I could choose just one as "the best".

The committee lists are less interesting to me (even when they are ones I am surprised to find myself frequently agreeing with), because I use them primarily to remind myself of films I wanted to see but forget to get around to sticking on the Netflix queue. By melding various aesthetics in a quest for objectivity that ends up being more procrustean than coherent, the editors produce lists that feel, to me at least, almost random.

Whereas looking at the individual ballots is fascinating -- at Time Out London, for instance, I love that the dance editor put Man on Wire as #1. And when I looked at the ballots for the Time Out New York reviewers, I realized why I had liked the overall list more than any other committee list I've seen: though I preferred the individual lists to the combined one, none of the lists made me say, "Egads! I will never trust a review you write!" The film section at TONY is one I read closely because they have managed to put together a group of writers who do not have exactly the same tastes (how dull that would be!) but who share an approach to analyzing and evaluating movies -- an approach that often fits well with my own tastes. They also show a talent for writing very short reviews that are usually richer than many reviews twice their length.

As for me, I would need to go back and take a closer look at what came out between 2000 and this year before I could really make such a list. I'd also need to take another look at at least a few films (The Fall, Grizzly Man, Mysterious Skin, There Will Be Blood, 3-Iron, others) before I could sort out anything resembling a list I was happy with, but I know I would be inclined to include Across the Universe, Children of Men, Code Unknown, The Edge of Heaven, I'm Not There, Memories of Murder, Miami Vice, Mulholland Drive, The New World, No Country for Old Men, Nobody Knows, Public Enemies, Reprise, Spirited Away, Synecdoche, NY, The White Diamond, Yi Yi, Zodiac...

Oh, lists are such fun -- especially when I should be writing a final exam and/or doing housework!

Jury, Meet Peers

Lizzie Skurnick:

"I just want to say," I said as the meeting closed, "that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it's disgusting." (I wasn't built for the board room.) "But we can't be doing it because we're sexist," an estimable colleague replied huffily. "After all, we're both men and women here."

But that's the problem with sexism. It doesn't happen because people -- male or female -- think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man's wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he'd be a better manager. It's not that women shouldn't be up for the big awards. It's just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don't know . . . deserve them.

(Be sure to read the whole essay; it's a smart and sharp attack on a problem that we should be past at this point.)

The good people at Publisher's Weekly are probably speaking what they think is the truth when they say, about their all-male list of 10 "best" books of the year, that "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz." I believe them when they say, "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

But being disturbed is not enough. What they have done is shameful.

This is not just some blogger's list of favorite books of the year. This is the publishing industry's trade journal telling the world what ten books from 2009 deserve most acclaim and attention. This list will affect how books are stocked in stores and it will affect what books are bought by libraries. The fact that the list only includes male writers contributes to a problem.

The editors who created this list have chosen to perpetuate sexism. They have deliberately and knowingly made it easier for male writers to have access to sales and publicity at the expense of women writers. Their list perpetuates the idea that the best, most serious, and most consequential books are written by men, and that idea will continue to have an effect out in the world.

Our society has made plenty of great strides over the past centuries and decades in terms of reducing institutional sexism, but moments such as this highlight just how entrenched the patriarchy is. Yes, patriarchy. Male dominated, male identified, male centered. It's insidious, and it is self perpetuating.

There is no objective, essential "best". There is stuff we like and stuff we don't -- texts we have developed techniques for appreciating and texts that we do not, for myriad reasons, appreciate. There are texts about which we have built large critical apparatuses for justifying as "great". Perceptions of gender, race, sexuality, class, and other broad social categories mix with our experiences as readers, our educations, etc., to produce the judgments we make. Though we may struggle to create vivid and convincing justifications for our judgments, there are still mysteries to any evaluation that strives for nuance. But even so, we can expand our awareness, question our gut instincts, analyze our justifications, wonder why we are doing what we do and saying what we say. To assume that we can simply "not pay attention" to some of the central forces structuring our perception of reality is naive. We might be powerless to change them, but we might also be in a position to avoid perpetuating them and adding strength to them. We don't have any choice about whether the society we're born into is racist, sexist, heterosexist, whatever. But we do have some choice about how we relate to that society, how we work within it, what we pay attention to, and how we choose to make our choices.

I'm not ranting from a position of innocence -- most of the writers I most deeply value are men (many of whom are white, middle class, born within the last 150 years, and not from the U.S.). I have some hunches for why this is, hunches related to early reading experiences, prejudices about language and its relationship to reality, etc. Personal taste and judgment are too complex to explain simply or conclusively. Individual readers are strange creatures, full of prejudices and whims and blind spots and allergies. Individually, I expect there are weird particulars other than race, class, and gender that affect our taste more profoundly, more forcefully than those social categories themselves (if those social categories could ever be isolated, which I am skeptical of anyway -- any discussion of them is provisional and strategic). But when we move beyond the individual, as lists try to do, we're moving into the realm of systems and social structures -- means of distribution and consumption, gravitational forces that shape and warp how we talk about the realities we perceive, the tides we choose to sail with or against. And that talk itself then goes on to shape some more realities and turn some tides.

All of which is just me noodling around and trying to say the same basic thing: An institution with the power of Publisher's Weekly has more responsibility than an individual has, because the power that institution wields is greater than the power of most individuals (certain folks like Oprah excepted, although I can imagine people could argue that "Oprah" should be considered more of an institution than an individual).

Or, more basically, what I said above: The editors at Publisher's Weekly should be more than disturbed. They should be ashamed.

Here's a book to add to a best of the year list: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter. I've got plenty of quibbles with the book, especially Showalter's dismissive attitude toward Gertrude Stein, but I'm also finding it (still reading; it's big) a rich source of information and delight. I've already begun seeking out writers I hadn't heard of until reading Showalter, and revisiting ones I had not paid enough attention to. Check out Katha Pollitt's review of Showalter at Slate or Rebecca Hussey's at The Quarterly Conversation or Sarah Churchwell's at The Guardian or Susan Salter Reynolds's at The L.A. Times.

Or watch Sarah Nelson, former editor-in-chief of Publisher's Weekly, interview Showalter.

I haven't read nearly as many books published this year as the editors at PW have, but I'm perfectly happy to propose A Jury of Her Peers as the best book of the year on a single criterion: It's the book we, the litterateurs and taste proclaimers, seem to need the most.

Best of the Millennium!

The Millions polled a bunch of writers to come up with a fun list of really good books:

It’s a bit early, of course, to pass definitive judgment on the literary legacy of the ’00s, or how it stacks up against that of the 1930s, or 1850s. Who knows what will be read 50 years from now? But, with the end of the decade just a few months away, it seemed to us at The Millions a good time to pause and take stock, to call your attention to books worthy of it, and perhaps to begin a conversation.

As of this writing, they haven't revealed the top two, but numbers 3-20 are there, and it's a good list -- I'm amazed, actually, at how many of them I've read all or part of. There's not a book on there I would fight vociferously against including, even if novels like Gilead aren't really to my taste (though I've used that book in a couple of classes, so I wouldn't say I hate it ... I just don't see what it seems everybody else on Earth sees in Marilynne Robinson's writing). I wouldn't arrange the books in the order arranged in the list, and actually would probably not put them in any order other than alphabetical, but that's probably true of all the contributors as well -- it's a survey. I'd also probably choose Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners over Stranger Things Happen only because "Lull" and "Stone Animals" are my favorite of Kelly's stories.

Scott Esposito has posted some interesting thoughts on the choices, and I'm sure other people have as well.

I usually can't resist lists, but if I had been asked to "name up to five books available in English with an original-language publication date no earlier than Jan. 1, 2000", I have no sure idea what I would have named. I probably would have tried for some that might otherwise not get much mention because of the various voters' lack of familiarity with them -- books, for instance, by guys named Jeff (Shriek, The Empire of Ice Cream).

Or maybe I would have gone with books that always come to my mind when I think of recent fiction that has particularly impressed me (Oh Pure & Radiant Heart, People of Paper, Octavian Nothing 1, Dark Reflections [this latter book being one that is more impressive every time I return to it -- true of the others, as well, but Dark Reflections is one that it really took me multiple reads to fully appreciate]).

Or, well, I don't know.

I just looked up M. John Harrison's Light and Things That Never Happen, the publication dates of which I couldn't remember, and they do qualify (both 2002), so one of them at least should certainly be on the list. And probably a few things I've forgotten but will remember seconds after publishing this post.

But if you're looking for some good, serious reading, you could do a lot worse than to try out the books on The Millions list.

Update (9/26/09): And the winner is ... The Corrections. Huh. Well, it's a survey, and inevitably the item most common to various lists will be safe, solid, and underwhelming.

Amazon's Best

It's so rare that I agree with lists of the best books of the year that I'm astounded to see Amazon.com picked two books I'm quite fond of as its top two science fiction/fantasy titles of the year: Brian Slattery's Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America and Jeff Ford's The Drowned Life (a book I'm hoping to write about in the next week or two). I may even like more than those top two, but I haven't had time to read any of the others.

Thus, this week various people I voted for actually won elections and a top-ten list was published that I don't hate. What is happening to me?! Why is the world trying to make me content?!!

Lists and the Listless

Oh, if we denizens of the internets don't love us some lists! Me too, me too! I used to make lists of best this-that-and-another-thing -- best 3 home appliances I have used in my life (the pink feather duster always tops the list!), best 673 songs to listen to while shoveling gravel, etc. -- but there was something terribly authoritarian about it all, and the rabidly anti-authoritarian part of myself screamed back at the little tin dictator in my soul that such list-making is nothing more than a goofy manifestation of a fascist impulse. (The rabidly anti-authoritarian part of my soul uses the word "fascist" without much precision, alas. The more moderate anti-authoritarian part of my soul has read both Fascism: A Very Short Introduction and The Anatomy of Fascism and even the Wikipedia entry, so would never think of applying the term to such an innocuous little hobby as list-making.)

The lists I like these days are of the personal kind -- the books that, for whatever idiosyncratic reasons, particularly influenced a person, the books a person keeps near the desk, the movies a person watches to cheer them up (or bring them down), the animal species a person particularly likes to taunt at the zoo... Lists that revel in their subjectivity.

Samuel Delany has pointed to the opening of Thomas M. Disch's story "Descending" as an exemplary use of listing to efficiently suggest a character:

Catsup, mustard, pickle, relish, mayonnaise, two kinds of salad dressing, bacon grease, and a lemon. Oh yes, two trays of ice cubes. In the cupboard it wasn't much better: jars and boxes of spices, flour, sugar, salt -- and a box of raisins!

An empty box of raisins.

Not even any coffee. Not even tea, which he hated. Nothing in the mailbox but a bill from Underwood's: Unless we receive the arrears on your account....

A fine opening, and marvelous list to offer us a glimpse of a person.

The urge to list has led recently to the kind that least interests me -- X Science Fiction Novels of the Last Y Years That are Most Important, Yeah Yeah Yeah! -- although I was pleased to discover David Moles likes one of my favorite LeGuin books, Four Ways to Forgiveness, and so I now feel less alone. I do like to see both what is individual (e.g. David's choice of one of LeGuin's more neglected books) and what gets left out. Silences and lacunae. But I'm also the sort of perverse person who, when told n, o, and p are Q's best books ... immediately goes out and reads the others instead.

Anyway, the point of this was not to make fun of other people's hobbies (fascists!), but to point to two particularly interesting lists -- Ron Silliman's list of theoretical books that particularly influenced him and Jeff Ford's list of books that are part of the Breakfast of Champions for Fantasy Writers (in other words, "non-fiction books that are just so chocked full of cool ideas, descriptions of interesting phenomena, exotic tidbits of history, or compelling instances of the human condition that they make great fodder for the creation of Fantasy fiction"). Subjective, not authoritarian lists. Lists that tells us a lot about the list-maker and also point us toward books we might not otherwise know about.

Silliman has also written a few blog posts (here and here) that expand on why some of these books were important to him, the connections he sees between them, and the implications of their interest to him. He also offers some more general thoughts on that thing that has come to be called Theory and gets some intelligent and thoughtful comments from readers.

Since list-making is a kind of parlor game, it might be fun to create another parlor game from these lists: list five books from the various lists now floating out there on the many blogs you read, then imagine what would happen if a person read all five of those books one after the other. For instance:

• Fairyland by Paul McAuley (from this list)
  
• Moonwise by Greer Gilman (from this list)
  
• The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castenada (from Jeff Ford's list)
  
• Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss (from Ron Silliman's list)
  
• The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison (from this list)

I expect the effect of reading all five of these books one after the other, as quickly as possible, would be to make the reader feel a lot more sympathy for the various hallucinations and strange experiences of Philip K. Dick during the 1970s.

So Many Books...

I have very little time for extra reading right now, which is frustrating, because a bunch of interesting books have arrived recently. (The good news: I will be making a substantial change of life this summer, and with luck that change will open up a lot more time for reading and writing. Just have to survive the next three months...) Here, then, are some comments on books I have not yet had much time to look at, but am keeping on my To Be Read pile...

Weird Tales Issue 348: Word on the street is that Ann VanderMeer's second issue as fiction editor of Weird Tales is awesome (and not just because of the fiction). I enjoyed Ann's first issue, and intend to get to this one ... very...........soon.........

Speaking of Ann VanderMeer, I also now have copies of two anthologies she and some guy named Jeff edited: The New Weird and Steampunk. I've actually been so excited by both that I couldn't help myself from dipping into them, even though I should be doing work on the book I'm working on with the VanderMeers myself, Best American Fantasy 2. But these are such fascinating books, full of strange and entertaining and hard-to-find-elsewhere material. I continue to be blown away by the commitment of Tachyon Publications to publishing really exciting collections and anthologies. They've been doing a good job of this for a while, but I don't think they've ever been better than they are now. Such books as the VanderMeers' anthologies, the two Kelly&Kessel anthos, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, the Asimov's 30th Anniversary Anthology, the Hartwell&Kramer The Year's Best Fantasy and so many others are doing a great service for SF short fiction in our time. (And yes, I had long ago promised an interview with the Tachyon folks. I dropped the ball on that one, for various reasons, but may be able to convince them to take pity on me and continue...)

Oh, and another Tachyon book on the TBR pile: The Word of God, in which Thomas M. Disch explains how he became a deity and what his plans are for us. From flipping through, I see it contains, as it should, one of my favorite Disch poems: "Ballade of the New God".

Moving down through the pile we find ........ The Adventures of Amir Hamza, 900 pages of Urdu classic. Ancient epic fantasies can be great fun, and this is one of the books I'm saving for my future free time.

Look! More anthologies! I've actually started and will definitely finish reading John Joseph Adams's Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, because I'm a total sucker for apocalypse fiction, and the table of contents for this collection is varied and exciting. Also in this pile sits Brian Aldiss's Science Fiction Omnibus, which is a very weird book by the looks of it -- an update of his The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, it's a hodgepodge of classic (and sometimes terribly clunky) SF and more contemporary stories such as Kim Stanley Robinson's "Sexual Dimorphism", Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life", and John Crowley's "Great Work of Time" (the latter being among my favorite stories of the last 50 years, if not of all time). Also included is William Tenn's "The Liberation of Earth", and bringing that satirical masterpiece back into print is justification enough for the book's existence. (The paucity of female and non-white writers is notable, though, in a book that attempts to be a broad overview of the genre.)

The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia, which has been getting lots of good press recently. I actually started reading it yesterday, and unless I get sidelined by a bunch of other projects, I should be able to finish it in the coming days or weeks. Sedia is also the editor of Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, which I thought I had a copy of, but I've scoured the apartment in search of it, with no luck. (If I loaned it to you, please return it sometime int he next few months, please!) And she has a blog, which I somehow didn't know about, but have now added to the blogroll.

Del Rey is publishing two anthologies that, had I the time, I would devour right now, but which will have to wait till the summer: Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Douglas A. Anderson and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by Ellen Datlow. The subtitle of the first is a bit hyperbolic (THE roots?), but the contents are diverse and interesting, with stories by E. Nesbitt, Hans Christian Andersen, Valdemar Thisted, Charles Dickens, William Morris, J.R.R. Tolkien, and a bunch of others. Ellen Datlow's anthology contains original stories by such folks as Christopher Rowe, Carol Emshwiller, Maureen McHugh, Margo Lanagan, Barry Malzberg, Jeffrey Ford, and others whose names I should also have written here, but haven't.

The Underground City by H.L. Humes -- 755 pages with narrow margins means we won't be reading this one anytime soon, but boy is it tempting! The French Resistance in WWII, geopolitics, philosophy...

But no! Heck, I haven't yet finished reading Kelley Eskridge's delightful collection of short stories, Dangerous Space, which I've had for ages, so I can't start reading Humes. No no no. And I haven't even started Lucy Snyder's even-more-compact collection, Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. And yet the books continue to accumulate. (You should see the piles of ones I have no intention of reading!)

And what have we here? Birmingham, 35 Miles by James Braziel. I know nothing about this book, but it's a post-apocalypse story, so I stuck it on the TBR pile. ("When the ozone layer opened and the sun relentlessly scorched the land, there was little that remained." Got me from the first sentence on the back cover!)

Lauren Cerand sent me Have You Found Her: A Memoir by Janice Erlbaum, another book I know nothing about, but Lauren knows my taste, so I always give a try to anything she sends. It's the story of a woman who was a homeless teen and now, twenty years later, volunteers at a homeless shelter for teens to try to help kids like she was herself and she ends up meeting a girl who is "a brilliant 19-year-old junkie savant" who needs more help than anybody knew and now this sentence will end. Yes, that gets to stay on the TBR pile, and maybe move up a few places...

The Assassin's Song by M.G. Vassanji. I've been meaning to read this for months now, especially since Vassanji was my workshop leader when I was in Kenya in '06 and I have liked the other works of his I've read. But I haven't yet had time. Hmmmph.

Somebody at Orbit kindly sent me Ian M. Banks's new novel, Matter and two paperback reprints of Banks's first Culture novels, Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games. Now, I have to admit, I read Banks's Use of Weapons, which Orbit will be re-releasing in July, a couple years ago and didn't much care for it, which surprised me quite a bit, because lots of people whose taste is similar to mine have praised that novel tremendously (VanderMeer called it "the most devastating commentary on war and the effects of war written in the 20th century"), so when I found it shallow and cloying, I figured there must be something wrong with me and not the book ("Yes," says Jeff. "To the list of things wrong with you, add that."*). (But honestly, I disliked it so much I left it in a hotel room.) Thus, I intend to read these three books and fix my perception of Banks so that I can enjoy him as much as everybody else seeems to. Because, really, even though sometimes it doesn't seem it, all I want is to be just like everybody else.

I'll probably read Chip Kidd's second novel, The Learners pretty soon, because it's short and looks like fun. I thought his first novel, The Cheese Monkeys, was strange and entertaining, and I'm glad that, when he's not working as one of the best book designers in the biz, he finds time to write.

Hey, I do have a copy of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's End of the World Blues! The title alone was enough to make me want to read it, but I didn't remember that I already had a copy, and nearly bought it at a bookstore a couple months ago, though, knowing that I wouldn't have time to read it until summer, I restrained myself. Good thing I did. I should practice restraint more often so I get better at it. (No jokes about BDSM you dirty-minded so-and-so!)

And here are two books from small presses that I was looking at in case I ever got to be a nominator at the LBC again (pause for a nanosecond of silence in remembrance): Ohio River Dialogues by William Zink (Sugar Loaf Press) and Mortarville by Grant Bailie (Ig Publishing). Neither is tremendously long, so I still hope to read them in the coming months.

I adored Zoe Wicomb's first book, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, so when I discovered her most recent (I think...), Playing in the Light at McNally Robinson a few months ago, I scooped it up. Thinking I would read it immediately. Ahhh, the best laid thoughts of mice and ... the best laid mice of plans and.... the best Lenny........

And what is this? A new Elric book by Michael Moorcock with illustrations by the great and glorious John Picacio? Yes, indeed, it's Elric The Stealer of Souls. I've been meaning to read all the other Elric books for ages now. In time, perhaps I will. Until then, I can look at the pictures!

Richard Morgan's Thirteen is sitting here, too. I've had some problems fully embracing Morgan's other books, but he's one of those writers who I think will eventually write a book that really impresses me, and Thirteen could well be it. With luck, I'll get to see.

Finally, here's Felix Gilman's first novel, Thunderer, which, when I opened the envelope that covered it, I immediately put on the Not Right For Me pile because of the cover. It looks like a cheesey historical romance with pirate-ship-zeppelins. Pirate-ship-zeppelins are fine with me, but cheesey historical romances are not. But then I discovered it was edited by Juliet Ulman, whom I adore. And VanderMeer called him a "thrilling new fantasist". And Jay Tomio Robert at Fantasy Book Critic liked it and notes that the cover art isn't entirely a good representation of the book. And I do try hard not to judge books by their packaging. So I'll give it a try. Sometime. Sometime...

Meanwhile, I see there's another whole pile of books over there. No time to list them, though, as I still have a pile of tests and papers to grade. I'd rather be reading.

*Disclaimer: As I am practicing writing a memoir, I am now writing dialogue that I can imagine people saying, rather than dialogue they, well, did in fact say.** I haven't heard from Jeff today, nor have I ever told him about my trouble with Use of Weapons. Partly out of shame, but also because it never really occured to me. But I bet he'd say something like that. Or else, "You're a weirdo," which I get a lot. Not just from him. Not even primarily from him.

**Here's something I just wrote for J.M. Coetzee to say when a reporter asks him who his favorite contemporary writers are: "I think Matthew Cheney is at the top of that list. In fact, I don't think a better writer has ever lived. Future generations will value him in the way that current generations value Shakespeare."